Colorado bears in the middle of the night?

Specific concern is personal safety. I won't have any food with me at all. Thank you for your comment!

Same here. Whereas my wife won't go out into any bear habitat without a can of bear spray. In grizzly country she takes 2 cans. We all have our own risk tolerance level.


Definitely. Not only do there seem to be more of them, but they are also more habituated, and know to associate food with human activity.

In RMNP, hard sided commercially made carry in/carry out bear-resistant food storage canister are mandatory. There is no dispersed camping, you must stay at designated campsites.

Forget the bear spray, that's for grizzly country and best to procure two, one for practice and one for the field. Practice training your quickdraw and Z pattern spray pattern including spraying into the wind is a good idea.

Bears do bear stuff. Usually, black bears will run, it's in their historical evolutionary DNA. I had a cinnamon (black) bear encounter a week or so ago. I spoke "Good Morning Mr. Cinnamon Bear!" It bolted!

If you have a concern, bring an air horn. Try it at home first, freaking super loud.

www.rei.com/product/225100/frontiersman-bear-horn?msockid=33a5147a4d1e66fa118107864cf6678a

While the probability is low a 16 year old girl sustained bites and scratches from a black bear in the mountains we roam back in 1996 at night in her tent. She screamed and the adults made noise and one fired a shot into the ground but the bear persisted until it was shot. This was not in the Park but was in a campground.

48 years ago on top of another southern Arizona mountain a friend and I had just finished backpacking in and set up camp in the dark, I’d just zipped up my tent and was going to go to my friends area when a black bear walked out of the darkness on two legs right up to me close enough that I could have reached out and touched it had I been so inclined. I let out a rebel yell and we both pounded it with softball sized rocks and nobody ended up getting chewed on. Two years or so ago we were viscously attacked in a canyon near where we live as we sat back drinking our tea on a fine wilderness morning. The bear sort of blundered into us unaware raised up its full little yearling height of about 3’ at about 30’ distance, took a long look and lit out for the territories like its ass was on fire. Thankfully no mama bear in sight. The only regret was it happened too fast to obtain a photo. This was again USFS land.

Every black bear we have ever seen over the decades save that upright walking bear all ran off just like that yearling but every other bear was a good distance from us. Because of that one exceedingly strange bear of 48 years old walking up like that on two feet I always take caution when coming across bear scat or tracks but it’s still a bit of a thrill to see one. The few times we have camped and backpacked in Colorado we’ve never even seen one. Same with the rest of the country and Canada. The main reason we see them here in the amount of time we spend outdoors here. We have hiked at night a bunch. If you follow the advice about food from those above you will have extremely low probability of any altercation.